Every so often I get sort of freaked out how deep I am in the Apple ecosystem.

The most often occurs when I want to replace a device, and the combination of “geeze that costs a LOT” and “at this point in time, Apple hardware is sort of shit” makes me think that it’s all a really bad idea and I should GTFO.

The answer is always … complicated.

For example, I still have precisely 0 interest in DIY. So while BitWarden seems as capable a password manager as 1Password, it seems like the only obvious thing to do is to host my own locker, or I’m just trading lock-in A for lock-in B. But I don’t want to DIY something that important, and even if I did, I’m just locking myself into AWS or whatever else I use to host it.

The second problem is as crappy as eg Photos is, gotta tell ya, most of the alternatives are pretty much even worse. The thing about any given Apple app is, most of the bad press is when it first comes out. Photos was monstrous garbage. Lately, though, it’s really a generally OK-if-not-good-enough consumer-grade app. I’m not angry at Photos, the point of the exercise is “everything is locked up in one place and that’s scary”.

So unwinding myself from all this is tedious and there’s no great answers. And every day that goes by is another day I just dive deeper into FruitCo.

(Also no, I’ll never use Android, Android is bad and you should feel bad.)

Further complicating is that Apple might get its shit together and release some non-awful computers. Due this year are, if I recall correctly, the new Mac Pro desktops, and probably some upgrades to the line overall. So maybe it won’t be so bad? Maybe?

Success on the social media front is heartening, though. I’ve gotten rid of Slack, I’m mostly not using Instagram, and I only use Twitter via the web, which is so generally awful that it restricts use. I am desperately trying to use this blog more and am once again trying out Micro.blog.

I started using Flickr again but the public feed looks like a bunch of Very Serious photographers and not pictures of people’s lunch, which is about all I use it for when I’m not on vacation or camping or whatever. So I don’t expect I’ll get a lot of “likes” but as Insta is now pretty much “stealth Facebook”, I should get the fuck off it.

The bottom line, is that DIY remains hard even for a seasoned technologist. It’s a matter of time and effort I don’t always have. That sort of sucks.

On a whim I backed a Kickstarter for a cyberpunk 5e “total conversion”. It got me thinking about how you do deep system balance.

Somewhere there has to be a set of rules – a spreadsheet, a Perl script, something – that TSR and now WotC uses to work out game balance.

There’s back-of-the-envelope stuff in the 5e DMG, buried in the back (the part no one reads, I imagine – but you should, it’s some of the best stuff!). But, it’s very abstract and intended more to just get you into the balance ballpark.

So for example, what I’m wondering about is a small piece of math like:

For every spell level, base damage is 1d10.

automatic hits drop damage to d8 per level

for every 3 point save DC interval above 10, add +1 to damage

And so on. Some sort of balance algorithm.

A friend of mine tried once to reverse engineer this; he had a Perl script and a spreadsheet. He got pretty far into it; mostly enough to decide what he had worked well enough for his own games. Whatver math didn’t work out, he’d just eyeball and improvise in the context of the session.

TSR, WotC, and other D&D publishers don’t get to do that; you can’t improve printed materials. So it stands to reason there’s at least some way to 1)assure balance before press and 2)verify empirically (better than a guess) the balance of submitted materials. Right?

I’ve been playing TTRPGs for, oh, 37 years or something. I was exposed to Tolkien as a child, via the Rankin and Bass movies, and shortly thereafter a trip to a hobby shop exposed me to this strange board (?) game with lead figurines and weird dice and hobbits and dragons.

I was not allowed to play this strange game. Not because of the “Satanic Panic” of the time. Instead, my parents – inveterate spendthrifts – easily spied it as an activity that required money, which to them was far more pernicious and awful.

So I’d go to the hobby shop with my mom – I was, like, 8 – and sit and read the manuals while she shopped for craft supplies.

(I suppose I should explain to any younger readers that at the time, a “hobby shop” often contained a strange mix of what would now be separate Hobby Lobby, comic book, and toy stores. One part of the store was silk flowers, another was model rockets, still another needlepoint and fabric, and then a little corner with D&D books, minis, and paint. Also at the time, my main source of comic books was the grocery store.)

Then, I’d go home, and attempt to transcribe what I’d read into some meaningful semblance of a game. I didn’t have polyhedral dice, so I’d try to work out how to make it all work with the 5 6-siders I’d taken from the family Yahtzee game. I didn’t have minis, either, so I used army men.

It was an exceptionally unplayable game, but having never actually played D&D, I didn’t really know that. It was one of the first time I sat down and tried to create a mechanical system. I was hooked.

I’d eventually go on to play real D&D. I remember one DM thought hobbits only had 1 arm, because they couldn’t wield 2-handed weapons. Another couldn’t figure out THAC0 so he just rolled the first die at hand and made the player guess if the result was odd or even.

Over the years, I’ve probably seen hundreds of homegrown and commercial optional rules for D&D; mostly combat and spell casting, but also weird things like random weather tables and managing ones castle.

D&D is an at times frustrating mix of game and simulation. If you’re into that sort of thing you can do an incredible deep-dive on just what all that means, but if you only want the nickel-tour version: a game lets you survive what looks like dozens of sword blows, falls from a great height, or impacts from massive objects; a simulation carefully details just how incredibly fucking dead you are from just one good sword wound (or, how if you survive it, you lose use of a limb or whatever, in other words, permanently maimed).

The other day I was thinking about how to bolt on a system to core D&D combat that allowed for “glancing blows”; that “hits” should be split into solid and meager hits. The damage system doesn’t really allow for that well; if you have a sword with a magic effect, it fires if you do 1 points of damage or 10. And don’t get me started on armor classes and hit points …

When it suddenly occurred to me. I have a bookshelf (and now, digital one) laden with games systems that aren’t by-God D&D, with often novel mechanics to resolve these and many other “problems” with D&D. It’s not just that we want a particular flavor of fantasy world; we want the mechanical resolution to reflect that world.

I think back to the odd-or-even DM, and how while I was perpetually annoyed at “why bother having a magic sword if it’s all just a 50/50 chance to do anything”, what was fun was not the deep, careful, intellectual manipulation of a mathematical/mechanical system, but the game itself. Suspense, action, chaos, heroism, adventure, and discovery; that was the fun. The fun with maths what just what I did when I wasn’t actually playing D&D with my friends.

So I’ll get these ideas, and think, this would be fun for 5E, but, ugh, hit points. But I think now that’s wrong. Mechanics are fun and important, but should never outweigh the value of the game itself.

Programmers lose sight of the business value of the programs we write, instead thinking about the elegance of the algorithms or the utility of some set of libraries. I think I’ve spent a lot of time losing sight of the game itself by spending my idle time thinking about the simulation.

Emacs, Smalltalk, Genera, and VBA embody a vision of malleable end-user computing: if the application doesn’t do what you want, it’s easy to tweak or augment it to suit your purposes. Today, however, end-user software increasingly operates behind bulletproof glass. This is especially true in the growth areas: mobile and web apps. Furthermore, not only is it getting harder to manipulate the application logic itself, but it’s also becoming harder to directly manipulate your data. With Visual Basic, you can readily write a quick script to calculate some calendar analytics with Outlook. To do the same with Google Calendar is a very laborious chore.

End-user computing is becoming less a bicycle and more a monorail for the mind.

As a consequence, we need ever more domain-specific software. Rather than use universal tools for handling charts and for manipulating data, we tend to use separate analytics packages for every conceivable application. This is not all bad. Domain-specific tools can maximize ease-of-use and help amortize the cost of complex, specialized functionality. Sublime’s built-in ⌘-T works better than every third-party Emacs package. Still, despite these benefits, the popularity of macros and browser plugins strongly suggest that users are smart and want more control.

Should we just give up on our earlier visions of empowered users or is a better equilibrium possible?